If Jesse Goes For The Oval Office, He`ll Make A Perfect Target For Cheap Shots

COMMENTARY

March 22, 1987|By STEVE WELLER, Staff Columnist

Run, Jesse, run! No, not you, Jesse. The other one. Helms that is.

The senator from North Carolina should answer the call from his conservative supporters and run for the Republican nomination for the highest office in the land.

Every presidential campaign needs a sitting duck, a target for media cheap shots, and I can`t think of a bigger bullseye than Jesse Helms.

No, his followers can`t in good conscience use the exhortation, ``Run, Jesse, run!`` It`s one of the best ever. Much more stirring than ``Nixon`s the One,`` much more electric than ``I Like Ike.`` But it belongs to the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who rode the slogan into the Democratic race in 1984. Jackson may run again but, for the rest of this column, when the name Jesse is used, it refers to a white reactionary, not a black liberal.

The man pushing the Helms bandwagon is Carter Wrenn, the director of the senator`s political fund-raising team. Right now that isn`t a serious strain. There is nobody on the wagon. Not even Helms, who is playing it coy, not saying yes, not saying no.

Wrenn is working to change that, sending out letters asking conservatives to rally behind one of their most prominent heroes and urge him to carry their banner into the fray. In addition to their moral support, backers are being asked to send the money needed to contact all of the sports who helped Helms raise the remarkable sum of $16.5 million for his 1984 senatorial campaign.

If I were Jesse, I`d play hard to get for at least another three months. He knows he is second prize. Pat Buchanan, former White House communications expert and noted political Neanderthal, was the overwhelming choice of real conservatives.

With all due respect to the owlish Helms, Buchanan would have been more fun. His denunciations of all things liberal, each one dotted with little flecks of foam, would be much more enticing cheap shot targets than anything any other Republican orator could produce.

Perceptive Pat turned down the invitation, not because he feared the inevitable pasting he would take from the pinko wimp running dogs of the press but because he didn`t want to cause a split in the conservative vote.

Wrenn says he started his Helms-for-President drive because no other available politician has Jesse`s appeal to the party`s right wing. He also says he can`t understand why nobody else has been able to unite and motivate conservatives.

Jack Kemp hasn`t been able to do it. The Rev. Pat Robertson hasn`t been able to do it. Attila the Hun could do it but he`s eligible to run, and vote, only in Chicago.

Kemp, Robertson and Helms all owe much to Ronald Reagan. Propelled into office by great personal charm and a skeletel framework of old-time conservative values, the president has created the impression among psuedo- conservatives that they will rule the future.

The truth is, there are only 14 genuine mossbacks in the whole country, they have been deeply disappointed by Reagan`s performance, and there isn`t anybody this side of Lyndon LaRouche with the credentials needed to satisfy them.

Liberals also owe much to Reagan. He blew his opponents out of the tub by proving the majority of Americans are tired of the philosophical bromides recited by Democratic hacks for so many years.

Reagan also demonstrated to American voters the hazards of some sections of his own agenda -- supply side economics, an end to the separation of church and state, a cavalier approach to the Constitution, a plantation approach to the problems of blacks.

If Democrats haven`t learned anything from Reagan`s strong and weak points, they don`t deserve to return to the White House.

Without a little new blood and some weird candidates the coming campaign could be a real snoozer. Gary Hart. Whozit Gephardt. The guy from Arizona. George Bush. Pierre du Pont. Robert Dole. Not a fun sitting duck in the bunch.